If there is a backlash against British Muslims, where
is the evidence for it? Scaremongering about Islamophobia
promotes a Muslim victim culture and allows some community leaders to inflame a
sense of injury while suppressing internal debate. The new religious hatred law
will make matters worse

KenanMalik

KenanMalik is a
writer and broadcaster

Ten years ago, no one had heard of Islamophobia.
Now everyone from Muslim leaders to anti-racist activists to government
ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of a major
backlash against Islam.

But does Islamophobia exist? The trouble with the
idea is that it confuses hatred of, and discrimination against, Muslims on the
one hand with criticism of Islam on the other. The charge of "Islamophobia" is all too often used not to highlight
racism but to silence critics of Islam, or even Muslims fighting for reform of
their communities.

In reality, discrimination against Muslims is not as great as is often claimed.
When making a film on Islamophobia for Channel 4, I
discovered a huge gap between perception and reality. One issue is police
harassment of Muslims. Last summer, the home office published figures that
revealed a 300 per cent increase in the number of Asians being stopped and
searched under Britain's
anti-terror laws. Journalists, Muslim leaders and even the home office all
shouted "Islamophobia." "The whole
Muslim community is being targeted by the police," claimed KhalidSofi of the Muslim Council
of Britain.

The bald figure of a "300 per cent increase" suggested heavy-handed
policing at the very least. But dig a little deeper and the figures show that
just 3,000 Asians had been stopped and searched in the previous year under the
Terrorism Act. Of these, probably half were Muslim. In other words, around
1,500 Muslims out of a population of at least 1.6m had been stopped under the
terror laws—hardly a case of the police targeting every Muslim.

A total of 21,577 people from all backgrounds were stopped and searched under
the terror laws. The majority—14,429—were white. Yet when I interviewed IqbalSacranie, general secretary
of the Muslim Council of Britain, he insisted that "95-98 per cent of
those stopped and searched under the anti-terror laws are Muslim." The
real figure is 14 per cent (for Asians). However many times I showed him the true statistics, he refused
to budge. His figures appear to have been simply plucked out of the sky.

There is disproportion in the treatment of Asians: they make up about 5 per
cent of the population, but account for 14 per cent of those stopped under the
Terrorism Act. Could this be because of anti-Muslim prejudice? Perhaps. But it is more likely to be because most
anti-terror sweeps take place in areas—near Heathrow airport, for
instance—where many Asians happen to live. Almost two thirds of terrorism stop and search operations took place in London, where Asians form 11 per cent of the
population.

The claims of Islamophobia become even less credible
if we consider all stop and searches. Only a tiny proportion of the 869,164
stop and searches in 2002-03 took place under the Terrorism Act. If there were
widespread Islamophobia within the police force, we
should expect to find Asians in disproportionate numbers in the overall
figures. We don't. Asians are stopped and searched roughly in proportion to
their population, if age structure is taken into account.

All these figures are in the public domain. Yet not one reputable journalist
challenged the claim that Asians were being disproportionately stopped and
searched. So pervasive is the acceptance of Islamophobia
that no one even bothers to check if it is true.

In the debate about stop and search, there is objective data against which to
check claims about Islamophobia. For physical
attacks, however, the truth is harder to discern. The definition of a racist
attack has changed radically over the past 20 years. These days everything from
name-calling to brutal assaults is included in the figures. The problem is
compounded by the fact that, following the MacPherson
inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the police are obliged to accept
the victim's perception of an attack. If the victim believes it to be a racist
attack, the police have to treat it as one, leading to
a large subjective element in the reporting.

If statistics for racist attacks are difficult to compile, it is even more
difficult to define an Islamophobic attack. Should we
treat every attack on a Muslim as Islamophobic? If an
Afghan taxi driver is assaulted, is this a racist attack, an Islamophobic incident or simply a case of random violence?
Such uncertainty gives licence to peddle all sorts of
claims about Islamophobia. According to IqbalSacranie, Muslims have
never faced greater physical danger than they do now. The editor of the Muslim
News, Ahmed Versi, similarly believes that,
"After 11th September, we had the largest number of attacks ever on
Muslims."

My personal experience and the statistics that do exist both challenge these
claims. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, racism was vicious and
often fatal. Stabbings and firebombings were routine
in some parts of Britain.
In May 1978, over 7,000 Bengalis marched from Whitechapel
to Whitehall in
protest at the murder of garment worker Altab Ali
near Brick Lane—one
of eight racist murders that year. In the decade that followed, there were at
least another 49 such killings. For Muslims, the end of the 1980s—from the
Rushdie affair to the first Gulf war—was particularly tough. I used to organise patrols on east London estates to protect Asian families from
racist attacks.

Britain
is a different place now—even for Muslims. There are still racist attacks.
Early in December, three young Muslims were beaten up in Manchester by a 15-strong gang in what the
police described as a "dreadful racial attack." Yet we have moved a
long way from the 1970s and 1980s, and I get little sense of the intensity of
racism that existed then.

What statistics are available lends weight to this personal perception. The EU
was so concerned about attacks on Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 that it
commissioned a special report. In the four months following the attack on the
World Trade Centre, the EU discovered around a dozen serious physical attacks
on British Muslims. That is a dozen too many, but it does not amount to a
climate of Islamophobia.

Even Muslim organisations that campaign
against Islamophobia find it hard to make the
case that attacks on Muslims are routine. The Islamic Human Rights Commission
monitored 344 attacks on Muslims in the year after 11th September. Most were
relatively minor incidents such as shoving or spitting.

For Muslim leaders, inflating the threat of Islamophobia
helps consolidate their power base, both within their own communities and wider
society. British Muslims have long looked with envy at the political power
wielded by the Jewish community, and by the status accorded to the Board of
Deputies of British Jews. One of the reasons for setting up the Muslim Council
of Britain was to try to emulate the political success of the board. Muslim
leaders talk about using Islamophobia in the same way
that they perceive Jewish leaders to have exploited fears about antisemitism.

Exaggerating anti-Muslim prejudice is also useful for mainstream politicians,
and especially for a Labour government that has faced
such a political battering over the war on Iraq and its anti-terror laws.
Being sensitive to Islamophobia allows them to
reclaim some of the moral high ground. It also allows Labour
politicians to pitch for the Muslim vote. Muslims may feel "betrayed"
by the war on Iraq,
trade minister Mike O'Brien wrote recently in the Muslim Weekly, but "the Labour government is trying to deliver an agenda that has
shown consideration and respect for Muslims." According
to O'Brien: "IqbalSacranie,
the general secretary of the Muslim Council, asked Tony Blair to declare that
the government would introduce a new law banning religious discrimination.
Two weeks later, in his speech to the Labour party
conference, Tony Blair promised that the next Labour
government would ban religious discrimination. It was a major victory for the
Muslim community in Britain."

Pretending that Muslims have never had it so bad might bolster community
leaders and gain votes for politicians, but it does the rest of us, Muslim or
non-Muslim, no favours at all. The more that ordinary
Muslims come to believe that they are under constant attack, the more
resentful, inward-looking and open to extremism they are likely to become.

In the course of making my documentary, I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims
across the country about their experiences of Islamophobia.
Everyone believed that police harassment was common, although no one had been
stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife, though
few had been attacked or knew anyone who had. What is being created here is a
culture of victimhood in which "Islamophobia" has become a one-stop explanation for
the many problems facing Muslims.

Consider the social problems which beset Muslim communities. Bangladeshis and
Pakistanis, who make up almost two thirds of the Muslim population in this
country, are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than whites; the
average earnings of Muslim men are 68 per cent that of non-Muslim men; 65 per
cent of Bangladeshis are semi-skilled manual workers compared with 23 per cent
among other ethnic minorities and 15 per cent among white Britons; 54 per cent
of Pakistani and Bangladeshi homes receive income support; in 2000, 30 per cent
of Pakistani students gained five or more good GCSEs,
compared with 50 per cent in the population as a whole. It has become common to
blame all of this on Islamophobia. According to the
Muslim News, "media reportage on Islam and Muslims has a huge impact on
Muslim labour market performance."

Unemployment, poverty and poor educational achievement are not,
however, new phenomena in Muslim communities in this country, and the causes
are many and varied. Racism plays a role. But so does class. The social profile
of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is closer to that of Afro-Caribbeans
than it is to Indians or Chinese. While the latter are often from middle-class
backgrounds, most Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans
come from working-class or rural backgrounds.

Some also point the finger at cultural practices within some Muslim
communities. "By and large," the journalist YasminAlibhai-Brown acknowledges, "the lowest
achieving communities in this country are Muslim. When you talk to people about
why this is happening, the one reason they give you, the only reason they give
you, is Islamophobia." It is not an argument
that Alibhai-Brown accepts. "It is not Islamophobia that makes parents take 14-year-old bright
girls out of school to marry illiterate men."

Alibhai-Brown disagrees with me about the extent of Islamophobia, believing that it is a major force shaping
Muslim lives. But, she adds, it has also become "a convenient label, a figleaf… and all too often Islamophobia
is used to blackmail society."

What all this suggests is the need for a frank, open debate about Muslims and
their relationship to wider British society. The likelihood of such a frank,
open debate is, however, not very high. "Islamophobia"
has become not just a description of anti-Muslim prejudice but also a
prescription for what may or may not be said about Islam. Every year, the
Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) organises a
mock awards ceremony for its "Islamophobe of the
Year." Last year there were two British winners. One was Nick Griffin of the
British National Party. The other was Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
Toynbee's defence of secularism and women's rights,
and criticism of Islam, was, the IHRC declared, unacceptable. Isn't it absurd,
I asked MassoudShadjareh
of the IHRC, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader
of a neo-fascist party. Not at all, he replied.
"We need to engage and discuss. But there's a limit to that." It is
difficult to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim
figures are unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist
attacks. It would be tempting to dismiss the IHRC as a fringe organisation. But it is not. It is a consultant body to the
UN. Its work has been praised by the Commission for Racial Equality. More
importantly, its principal argument—that in a plural society, free speech is
limited by the need not to give offence to particular religious or cultural
groups—has become widely accepted.

So the government is proposing new legislation to outlaw incitement to
religious hatred. The serious and organised crime and
police bill will make it an offence "to knowingly use words, behaviour or material that is threatening, abusive or
insulting with the intention or likely effect that hatred will be stirred up
against a group of people targeted because of their religious beliefs."
Supporters of the law claim that it will extend to Muslims, and other faith
groups, the same protection that racial groups already possess. Sikhs and Jews
are protected by the Race Relations Act. The new law is designed to meet the
Muslim concern that they have been left out.

But it is already an offence to incite religious hatred. The 1986 Public Order
Act was amended in 1998 to include the offence of "religious aggravation."
A person commits an offence if he "displays any writing, sign or other
visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the
hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or
distress." The offence "may be committed in a public or private
place." Shortly after 9/11, Mark Norwood, a BNP member, was convicted
under this law after he placed a poster in his window with a picture of the
World Trade Centre in flames and the slogan "Islam out of Britain."

In any case, there is a fundamental difference between race and religion. You
can't choose your skin colour; you can choose your
beliefs. Religion is a set of beliefs. I can be hateful about other beliefs,
such as conservatism or communism. So why can't I be hateful about religion
too?

Some supporters of the law insist that it will continue to allow us to mock and
criticise religions. But in practice the law could be
a nightmare to enforce. Every Muslim leader I have spoken to wants to use the
law to ban The Satanic Verses. Ahmed Versi, editor of
the Muslim News, thinks that Margaret Thatcher should have been prosecuted for
suggesting that after 11th September there had not been "enough
condemnation of terrorism from Muslim priests."

Ten years ago, the Tory government rejected a similar law because ministers
feared that it could be used to ban The Satanic Verses. Today, home office
ministers and the director of public prosecutions assure everyone that this
won't happen. "We will still be free to insult each other," the
director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, told me. This means many
Muslims will not be satisfied. Having encouraged exaggerated fears about
anti-Muslim prejudice, and led Muslims to believe that the new law has been
designed to meet their concerns, ministers might find
it difficult to dampen Muslim expectations. The current view of the courts is
that any material that encourages public disorder can be seen as inciting
racial or religious hatred. So the new law may establish an incentive to create
public disorder as disgruntled groups attempt to censor what they regard as
offensive. The scenes in Birmingham
outside the Sikh play Behzti may be repeated many
times.

In a sense, though, the flaws in the proposed law are irrelevant, because its
real value is not practical but, in the words of the director of public
prosecutions, "symbolic." The legislation sets out, not to provide
legal remedy for a real problem, but to make a moral statement about what is
and is not socially acceptable. The aim of the law is not to censor us, but to
get us to censor ourselves.

The irony of this approach is that it undermines what is valuable about living
in a diverse society. Diversity is important, not in itself, but because it
allows us to expand our horizons, to compare different values, beliefs and
lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. In other
words, it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help to
create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective language of
citizenship. But it is just such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to
suppress in the name of "tolerance" and "respect."